Patrick Caldwell

Reporter

Patrick Caldwell is a reporter in Mother Jones’ DC bureau. Previously, he covered domestic politics for The American Prospect and elections for The American Independent. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and The Washington Independent. E-mail any and all tips to pcaldwell [at] motherjones [dot] com. Follow his tweets at @patcaldwell.

Patrick Caldwell is a reporter in Mother Jones’ DC bureau. Previously, he covered all things domestic politics for The American Prospect and elections for The American Independent. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and The Washington Independent. E-mail any and all tips to pcaldwell [at] motherjones [dot] com. Follow him on Twitter at @patcaldwell.

In the Iowa Senate race, Republican Joni Ernst may beat Braley by reviving the Bush-era politics of fear.

Rep. Bruce Braley, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Iowa, owes his political career to the Iraq War. When he first ran for Congress, in 2006, Braley campaigned heavily against the war, vowing to oppose funding for continued operations until President George W. Bush set a timetable for handing over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces. Iowans rewarded Braley with a House seat.

Now Braley is running for an open US Senate seat—and his promising political career could crater thanks to that same war. With Iraq back in the news this year thanks to ISIS, polls have shown that voters are once again considering terrorism when making political decisions. Braley's opponent, Republican state Sen. Joni Ernst, has taken full advantage. On the campaign trail, she warns Iowans of the threat of ISIS, frequently cites her experience as a National Guard commander in Iraq, and slams Braley's opposition to funding the war.

"Our nation is no safer than it was a dozen years ago," Ernst told a crowd of about 15 during a recent campaign stop in Guthrie Center, pointing to ISIS as an immediate and grave danger to US interests and, perhaps, the homeland. She's fond of pointing out the fact that she once trod on some of the ground ISIS now occupies. "We have got to do better, because unfortunately," she said, "if things continue down this path, we will be recommitting our Iowa sons and daughters to that region."

Ernst's allies also play up foreign policy threats. "I'm dying to have a voice that will tell radical Islam that we're going to fight you and keep the war over there," South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, one of the Senate's leading war hawks, said in Guthrie Center during a recent swing through Iowa on Ernst's campaign bus. Graham is up for reelection himself this year, but holds a safe Republican seat—"I tend to do better when I leave the state," he says—so he visited Iowa to advocate for electing a fellow politician who hails from the armed services. "I'm dying to have someone in the Senate who has been deployed themselves," he noted, "who knows what it's like to miss a birthday and a holiday, who's experienced what it's like to be in a combat theater, and who's seen the enemy up close." The world is a scary place full of enemies, Graham explained—and only electing Joni Ernst can keep America safe.

Ernst has made hay of Braley's opposition to funding the war. Those votes to try to force Bush to bring the war to a halt? Ernst has said that Braley "failed our veterans," and portrayed them as a betrayal of the people we sent into combat. "Congressman Braley has a record of not supporting men and women as they're serving overseas," she said at another campaign stop alongside Graham. "He's voted twice to defund our men and women as they were serving in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Although Ernst readily attacks Braley—always tying him to perceived fecklessness from President Obama—for perceived foreign-policy mishaps in letting ISIS proliferate in Syria and Iraq, she's been more hesitant to lay out exactly how she'd like to see the United States proceed. Even as raising fears of Islamic terrorists becomes acceptable campaign fodder, directly calling for US troops to be sent back to Iraq is still a step too far. But that won't be much comfort to Braley if he's no longer in Congress next year. Ernst has held a narrow lead in most recent polls headed into tomorrow. And listening to Ernst and her allies on the campaign trail in Iowa during these final days of election season, it often seems that Iowans have forgotten exactly why they sent Braley to Congress in the first place.

The Republican Senate candidate in Iowa has been hailed as the return of the tea party. She's really a sign of its triumph.

Early last Thursday morning, Joni Ernst, the Republican candidate for Senate in Iowa, swung by the Des Moines Rotary Club to speak at the group's monthly lunch meeting. Mostly white and mostly male, the club counts much of the state's political elite among its members. The day Ernst visited, I spotted the current Republican secretary of state, the GOP's nominee to succeed him, a Republican state senator and former congressional nominee, and a former state GOP chair in the crowd. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, who is about to win his sixth term in office, wasn't there, but his son Eric was sworn into the club before Ernst spoke.

Ernst is one of the surprise successes of the 2014 midterms. Thanks to a campaign predicated on playing up the state's growing urban-rural divide and tarring her Democratic opponent, Rep. Bruce Braley, as an out-of-touch urbanite, the one-term state senator has narrowly led most recent polls and holds a two-point advantage in Real Clear Politics' polling average ahead of next Tuesday's election.

If elected, Ernst would almost certainly be among the most conservative senators in the country. Yet she owes her rise to prominence not to the tea party, but to the Rotary Club types—the GOP establishment, which urged her to run and bet that her biography and folksy political charm would matter far more than her extreme policy positions. She is somehow both the handpicked champion of the mainline business-minded wing of the Republican Party and a hard-right conservative reactionary—the logical end-result of the ongoing merger of the tea party and the rest of the GOP. And if she wins on Tuesday, she'll set an example that Republican candidates will emulate for years to come.

Ernst's life story is at the heart of her appeal, and she knows it. "I didn't have a lot as a kid, but I didn't know any different," she told the Rotary crowd, regaling the room with tales of her childhood on a small family farm in southwest Iowa. She explained how, in 1989, she was one of 18 Iowa State undergrads sent on an agricultural exchange to a collective farm in Ukraine, which was then still a part of the Soviet Union. Ernst was shocked by the lack of modern amenities—the farm had no telephone, no running water, no car, no refrigerator. "They didn't have those freedoms, and you could tell they hungered for that," she said. The experience pushed her to join ROTC when she returned to campus.

"She was a different kind of candidate, which was the only way we were going to maybe have a chance to beat Braley."

Ernst built a career in the armed forces. She deployed to Kuwait in 2003 at the start of the second Iraq War, and serves as a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard to this day, leading the largest battalion in the state. In 2004, she ran for county auditor in her home county. She won, and was reelected in 2008. Then, in 2010, Branstad tapped Kim Reynolds, the state senator in Ernst's district, as his lieutenant governor. Reynolds and local Republicans recruited Ernst to run for Reynolds' seat, which she won with 67.4 percent of the vote.

Ernst's biography—and her record of electoral success—helped rally establishment Republicans to her cause, says Steve Roberts, a former chairman of the state party.

When Sen. Tom Harkin, the five-term Democratic incumbent, announced his retirement in 2013, the mainline GOP crowd knew Ernst was their woman. "She was a different kind of candidate, which was the only way we were going to maybe have a chance to beat Braley," Roberts says.

Soon after Harkin announced he would retire, Roberts and a gaggle of other establishment GOPers encouraged Ernst to run for the soon-to-be-open seat. That group included David Oman—a former chief of staff to Branstad who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1998 and was co-chair of Mitt Romney's Iowa campaign—and David Kochel, Romney's lead political strategist in the state. In July 2013, Ernst announced she would run for Harkin's seat. Reynolds, the lieutenant governor, endorsed Ernst a few months later, and Kochel and Oman joined Ernst's campaign. Romney, Kochel's former boss, endorsed Ernst this March. As the state's top Republican, Branstad didn't endorse a candidate in the primary, but his preference was no secret. "Pretty much everybody in the state knew that Ernst was Branstad's pick, even if he wasn't going to say so publicly," says Tim Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa.

Four other Republicans ran for the GOP nomination to replace Harkin. Like Ernst, they lacked statewide name recognition. But with the help of her friends in party leadership and a well-timed viral ad in which she promised to apply her pig-castrating skills to the federal budget, Ernst sailed to an easy victory in the June 3 primary. She finished with 56 percent of the vote—an outright majority that ensured she would not have to win over delegates at a potentially unpredictable nominating convention.

Since June, Ernst has tried to tack to the center, and Democrats have pointed to her comments during the primary to paint her as extreme. "That kind of stuff can come back to haunt you," Hagle says. But Ernst has brushed off her past positions, often by simply denying she ever held them.

As a result, Ernst's stump speech is light on policy specifics. She rolls through her bio, attacks Braley for being out of touch with farmers, complains about the Environmental Protection Agency, and touts Iowa's economic fortunes over the past several years of Republican rule. "We are at that critical juncture," she'll say. "We have to set America moving in the right direction, just as we have done here in Iowa. I believe our Iowa way, our Iowa values is exactly what we need to see in the federal government." How, exactly, those Iowa values would translate into federal policy is left unstated.

What Ernst lacks in policy substance, she makes up for with folksy charm and panache.

What Ernst lacks in policy substance, though, she makes up for with folksy charm and panache. She knows how to work a room, and she's an expert in the sort of retail politics expected in Iowa, where presidential hopefuls come every four years to prostrate themselves before caucus voters.

After the event at the Des Moines Rotary Club, Ernst's bus—"Honk if you think Washington is broken!" is printed in large letters on the back—cruised west on I-80 to the Guthrie County Courthouse for a small meet-and-greet with about 15 supporters. After a stump speech that include fart jokes about climate change regulation—"How do you regulate methane coming out of a cow? I haven't figured that out, I don't know how the EPA's going to figure that out"—Ernst pressed the flesh with the small group, greeting people with hugs as if they were old friends, and readily agreeing with the conservative take on any position they asked her about. The crowd ate it up. "We're Joni Ernst country. And it just don't get any better," Myrna Beeber, a retired nurse, told me. Beeber says she plans to vote for Ernst so that her "son in the military has an advocate in Congress," but others at the event couldn't offer much else for why they plan to vote for her. "I like her personality," another retiree, Benny Woodard, told me. "She's been in Iraq."

Braley peppers his stump speeches with numbers and policy specifics. But he doesn't have Ernst's easy charm. Last week, I watched him mingle amidst a group of old union hands at a United Steel Workers chili cook-off in the industrial outskirts of Des Moines. As one middle-aged union couple quietly enjoyed their meal, Braley walked up and awkwardly attempted small talk. "I'm just like you, I enjoy a lot of crackers in my chili," he said. The couple stared at their food with disinterest.

"We're Joni Ernst country. And it just don't get any better."

Braley was more at ease when he addressed the full room. He complained about tax breaks given to companies that ship jobs overseas. He put forth a simple pitch on how raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would boost everyone's fortunes, as 20 percent of the state's workforce makes below that level. "180,000 of those Iowans are women, half of them are over the age of 30, and almost a third of them have children," he said at the front of the room as several people lined up to fill up their cup at the keg behind him. "And if you're working full-time in Iowa and only earning $15,000 a year at a minimum wage job and living in poverty, that's just not right."

Last Sunday, I drove to Red Oak, the small town in Iowa's remote southwest where Ernst grew up. Red Oak is more than 30 miles from any interstate—let alone anything that could begin to qualify as a city—along two-lane highways that wind through cornfields and past grain silos. Downtown consists of one square block with a small park in the middle. The town's lone coffee shop is closed for renovations.

I had come to Red Oak to talk to Troy Price, the executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, who had planned to meet some of the few Democrats in this heavily Republican area and make a few calls from a phone bank at the town's Latino cultural center. But when we pulled up in separate cars at 7 p.m., the door to the Latino Center was shut and the lights were off. Price wasn't ready to immediately call it quits, so the two of us opened the unlocked door (this is small town Iowa, after all) and we walked around a few empty rooms to make certain there wasn't a secret backroom where the Democrats had sequestered themselves. After determining that the building was empty, we wandered back out to the street.

Price, mystified by the case of the missing phone bank, was in the middle of a panicked call to make sure Democrats actually exist on Ernst’s home turf when Jason Frerichs, the 37-year-old chair of the Montgomery County Democrats, ambled up and said hello. Frerichs said his handful of volunteers had already packed up for the day. But he was happy to chat, and suggested we walk the half-mile to a nearby Subway sandwich shop. Montgomery is the third unhealthiest county in the state, Frerichs explained, but he has dropped more than 100 pounds in the past year by eating better and exercising.

Frerichs, who moved to Red Oak from Iowa City three years ago, is the sort of Democrat who casually describes the GOP as a "party of white supremacists," refers to the Republican governor as "Terry Braindead" and says he wants to go across town and stick a Bruce Braley yard sign on Joni Ernst's lawn. (He hasn't, but he's convinced her neighbor to put one up next door.) "I'm not very well liked by the Montgomery County Republican Party," he explained. Price winced.

When we got to Subway, where he's clearly a regular, Frerichs went into politicking mode, asking the women behind the counter if they've voted yet and telling them that they should be troubled by Ernst's support for the personhood measure. They told him they are strongly opposed to abortion, and didn't seem convinced when he noted that the personhood bill could endanger access to birth control.

Midway through our meal, four Ernst staffers walked into the restaurant. They stood out—no one else in Red Oak was dressed business casual—and they carried themselves with the preternatural confidence of youth, like high-school quarterbacks before the big game, or Capitol Hill interns. The Ernst bus was refueling at the gas station next door. Price scrunched in his seat and immediately lowered his voice to barely above a whisper.

When Branstad and Romney's allies and the GOP establishment tapped Ernst, they "were looking at her resume," he said. "But her positions"—her extreme views on everything from privatizing Social Security to the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—"weren't great." The party suits made a bet that her positions wouldn't matter when paired with a stirring bio. On Tuesday, they'll find out if they bet right.

A man's life literally hangs in the balance in this year's governor's race in Colorado. As I explained earlier this month, Republican candidate Bob Beauprez has singled out a death row inmate by name and promised to ensure that he will be killed. "When I'm governor, Nathan Dunlap will be executed," Beauprez has said.

Dunlap was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996 for murdering four of his Chuck E. Cheese coworkers. But when his execution date neared last year, Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper issued a stay, though he refrained from offering permanent reprieve. Hickenlooper backed capital punishment in his 2010 campaign, but has since become an opponent, citing studies demonstrating the death penalty is not an effective deterrent, the cost of executions, and evidence showing it is inconsistently applied. The governor has also expressed qualms about Dunlap's mental illness and regrets jurors expressed about the case after sentencing.

The Republican Governors Association has joined Beauprez's cause in criticizing Hickenlooper for keeping Dunlap alive. The RGA recruited the father of one of Dunlap's victims to star in an ad and call Hickenlooper a "coward" who should be voted out of office. "There's not a day that goes by, I don't think about her," Dennis O’Connor says, looking right at the camera. "You thought you got your day in court and your justice, and I feel most of us were robbed of that."

Here's the ad, which the RGA has reportedly backed with $2 million worth of airtime:

Hickenlooper's campaign has called foul, saying the ad should be pulled for airing false information. At one point the ad suggests that Hickenlooper might "set him free." While Hickenlooper has said he would consider making the temporary reprieve permanent if he loses the race, that would just keep Dunlap off death row and reduce his sentence to life in prison. Hickenlooper isn't about to set Dunlap free to roam the streets of Denver.

The Denver Post, which is cited as the source for the RGA's disputed claim, published an editorial on Tuesday calling the ad's claims "preposterous" and misleading. As the editorial board wrote, "The article in question says no such thing about the possible release of Dunlap, no doubt because freedom for Dunlap is unthinkable."

"I think it's great when we can all communicate together."

Joni Ernst has latched onto pretty much every idea favored by the tea party. On Thursday afternoon, while campaigning in western Iowa, Ernst endorsed another concept favored by the grassroots right: officially declaring the United States an English language country. "I think it's great when we can all communicate together," Ernst said when a would-be voter at a meet and greet in Guthrie Center, Iowa, asked if she'd back a bill making English the official national language. "I think that's a good idea, is to make sure everybody has a common language and is able to communicate with each other."

Ernst spent the day campaigning with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the main architects of the comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Democratic-run Senate, but not the GOP-run House, in 2013. Ernst has opposed Graham's bill to put some undocumented workers on a path to citizenship, and regularlyattacks President Barack Obama's possible use of executive authority to allow immigrants to remain in the country as "amnesty."

Making English the official language is a longtime cause of Ernst's fellow Iowa Republican, Rep. Steve King (Guthrie Center is just outside King's congressional district). As a state senator in 2002, King pushed a law that made Iowa an English-only state. In 2007, King and Ernst, then a county auditor, sued Iowa's then-secretary of state, Democrat Mike Mauro, for offering voter forms in languages other than English.

Are the Kansas City Royals the secret sauce?

Kansas City sports fans aren't used to celebrating. The town's NFL team, the Chiefs, hasn't won a playoff game since 1994. The Royals, the other major sports franchise in town, hadn't made a playoff appearance since 1985. But local baseball fans are experiencing a rare bit of jubilation this year. Not only did the Royals sneak into the playoffs as a wild card, they won the AL pennant last week and are hosting the San Francisco Giants in game one of the World Series Tuesday night.

That's an exciting development for any millennial-aged sports fan from Kansas City who has lived a full life without post-season baseball. It's also welcome news for a pair of Republican politicians from Kansas, Gov. Sam Brownback and Sen. Pat Roberts, both of whom are battling their way through tight reelection bids: Research has shown that important wins by local sports teams around election season can boost an incumbent's performance.

A 2010 studyby researchers from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and Stanford University's business school looked at presidential, gubernatorial, and senate elections between 1964 and 2008, and overlaid their outcomes with results from college football games. When the local team won within two weeks of the election, the incumbent on the ballot received 1.05 to 1.47 percent more of the vote on Election Day.

But not all sports fandom is created equally, with certain victories carrying extra weight. When one of the teams that the researchers termed "locally important" won ahead of an election, they found that it could boost the incumbent's vote share by as much as 2.42 percent—a large enough margin to swing any close contest. "We find clear evidence that the successes and failures of the local college football team before Election Day significantly influence the electoral prospects of the incumbent party," the researchers wrote, "suggesting that voters reward and punish incumbents for changes in their well-being unrelated to government performance."

The researchers attributed these results to an improvement in overall happiness among voters around the election, boosting a willingness to support the political status quo when they're feeling content about other parts of their lives. The recent success of the long-struggling Royals reaching the championship round would certainly make the cut as a now important team. "These are different times in Kansas City," declares the Boston Globe. "Passengers arriving at Kansas City International Airport on Monday were greeted with stacks of blue and white balloons with yellow crowns on top."

Though the Royals are actually from Kansas City, Missouri, they've got plenty of boosters just across the border in the Sunflower State. About 20 percent of Kansas' population resides in Johnson County, the ring of suburbs outside Kansas City and one of the pivotal electoral zones that could decide whether Brownback and Roberts get to keep their jobs next year.

Brownback, who won by 30 points four years ago, has struggled in polls against his Democratic opponent all year as voters have turned against him over his giant tax cuts and efforts to purify the state GOP. And questions about Roberts' residency hurt his image enough that independent Greg Orman has run about even with Roberts since the Democratic candidate dropped out of the race. Both races have tightened as Election Day approaches, so don't be surprised if Roberts and Brownback strut around town in royal blue until November 4.